Circus Monster
by Chinarose277
Summary: The circus is a happy place, right? Not so for Oliver, who has seen the worst in what a circus can offer for entertainment. Being there so long has drained him of any hope or happiness, until he meets the new girl... Rating might change in later chapters.
1. Chapter 1: Prologue

Disclaimer: I don't own Vocaloid.

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><p>Everyone loves the circus. After all, it's main reason for existence is to entertain, right?<p>

To look at all of the amazing things that humans (or not-so-humans) can do?

To see, in amazement, the freaks and creatures that exist in this world?

Outside of the arena, it's all fun and laughs, as the smell of popcorn wafts through the seating and the sun seems to gleam a little more to throw red and yellow circus tent light around and distort everything into a whimsical picture of fun.  
>Inside of the arena, however, it's... Not nearly as fun. Having to perform for jeering crowds, being mocked for deformity, it's not quite as happy as it seems on the outside. Surely making people laugh and have fun isn't such a bad thing, but there are some horrible things that can rapture the attention of the masses.<br>While the classic circus clown set up or freak show will attract attention, a good torture session is what really brings in the money. Whether it's watching victims fighting the lions set loose on them, or what my company affectionately calls 'acid baths,' it's so much worse having to watch over and over and over again, because there isn't one city where that attraction doesn't draw crowds. I don't know how anyone could possibly go into this business and willingly stay there.  
>I don't know why I stay here, either. I would leave if I could, but I'm in the freak section of the circus.<p>

The freak section can never leave, ever.

Sure, we're given the liberty of not being put in cages that the mentally insane people use (probably because it's too expensive), but it's impossible to shake off the existence of the circus, regardless of how far you are from it. Cripples, the deformed, the surgically altered... They aren't accepted into regular society. And we've heard the stories, too. Every story ends in death, from execution in the streets or starvation.  
>The worst stories end with the runaway sent back to the circus.<p>

Once a runaway, you become part of the torture segment of the show. Thrown in with the lions, given your own special acid bath… It's sick and despicable, but it's supposed to keep us in line, and it works.

In my own opinion, I don't think I really look like a deformed freak. I'm pretty normal looking as a thirteen-year-old boy. My name is Oliver. I wear an old sailor jacket from my father, along with a white button down and shorts. It's all I have in terms of clothing. Better than nothing, which is exactly what you get if you take things for granted. I also wear his old hat, which hides my messy hair. I've had a British accent that's never been shaken off after all these years, and I'm blonde with gold-tinted eyes.

Well, only one eye.

My deformity comes from my robotic eye. It makes me sick to look at it, and most of the time, when I'm not performing, I try to cover it with a bandage. I can't remember the times when I used to have both eyes very well, and I don't remember when I got a robot eye to replace it at all. I came into the circus as a toddler, though, maybe three or four. My parents have been reduced to voices in my memory, and the world goes fuzzy when I try to think of what it's like outside of the circus.  
>While I don't know much about how life works outside of here and what I do know is limited, I think that my time at the circus has simply been hell. One that I'll never be able to escape, until I die. Maybe not even then. At one point, I couldn't even imagine how I could possibly go on, that there was nothing more life had to offer someone like me.<p>

It was honestly spiraling downhill fast, and it was getting worse.

That is, until I met her.

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><p>AN: First Vocaloid fiction, so don't expect too much out of it, hehe. ^^  
>I'm thinking there might be a lemon in the future. Though the fact that this is such an unusual pair... I don't know.<br>Reviews are appreciated!


	2. Chapter 2

The first time I had met her was when I had just turned thirteen. She was brought in the night after a performance, carted in a cage. It was obvious that this girl was terrified, cowering in a corner, using her hair to cover herself. The only part of her face we could see was one eye, which the hair allowed us to see through a small chink.

The mystery girl couldn't be understood by the anyone because she didn't speak English. It all sounded so foreign. Looking around desperately, she started talking faster, then switching to a different language. It wasn't English, but somehow... I understood it.

"Help me! W-where am I?" I could hear her crying out. It made me whip around to face the cage. It sounded familiar, yet I didn't know how I could understand her.

I pushed through the crowd, getting hit with elbows and getting my feet stepped on as I plodded through, until I was kneeling at the front of the cage.

I was surprised when I was able to find the words to reply to her. Hesitantly, I asked in the mystery language, "Can... can you r-repeat that?"

Mystery girl stopped shaking for a moment and looked up at me with two of the deepest blue eyes I had ever seen. Then she started to talk faster.

"Thank god! I... don't know where... and this place..." I could only understand bits and pieces of what she was saying. It was a miracle I could understand any, I suppose, considering I didn't even know what language this was.

"Stop! No, slow down. Stop!" I tried to calm her. She finally stopped talking staring , piercing me with her eyes. It was kind of unnerving. "I-I don't understand..."

Her face fell, but she spoke again. "Can you tell me where I am?"

I considered this, then answered "Norton and Beverly's Circus."

I didn't know how to say it in whatever language she understood, so I had to say it to Mystery Girl in English. Though confused, she didn't say anything about it, and nodded her thanks. It was at this point that I realized the room had gone quiet.

Everyone was staring at me, apparently surprised at the fact that I could converse with the mystery girl. The ringmaster, having been there to observe the newest member of his circus, looked impressed. I think he looked impressed, at least. The gaudy tall hat he wore on his head was tilted at an angle, and he was stroking his beard with a small smile on his lips. A strange feeling in my stomach tried to warn me of something. It was a feeling of dread.

"You! Um, Robot-Eye!"

"..."

"Yes! You. How is it you can speak with her? What language is that?"

"Um, I don't-"

He continued on, not letting me continue."How well can you communicate with her, boy?"

"Simple sentences. I'm not completely sure, tho-"

"Excellent! You'll be her partner." He paused, stroking his beard again. "Might as well make you two roommates while we're at it."

"B-but sir, the tent I'm in isn't big enough for more-" I stuttered, not wanting to cause any conflict between him and myself. Arguing with the ringmaster was never a path to follow.

"Nonsense!" He exclaimed at my doubt. He then turned to the general crowd of circus performers and yelled, "WHOEVER IS ROBOT-EYE'S ROOMMATE, YOU'D BETTER MOVE YOUR ARSE OUTTA THAT TENT BEFORE I FIND OUT."

Turning back to me and Mystery Girl, he winked and turned around, walking back to his quarters. It became quiet. After a while, though, the crowd began to disperse, with someone tossing me the key to Mystery Girl's cage. I fumbled with the lock for a while before managing to get it open. She didn't seem to want to get up, only looking at me with those wide blue eyes. I smiled a little, and offered her a hand.

"It's okay," I said in her language again, trying to get the hang of it. "Come, I'll show you the room. You look quite tired."

Cautiously, she reached for my hand. I pulled her up, and with that, we walked through the long, straigh aisle of tents that shone brightly with the moon's light until we stopped at our tent. Inside was a simple setup, with two cots on opposite sides of the tent, and belongings stored under them.

The ringmaster's threat must have hit home, because my neither my roommate, nor his belongings were in the tent by the time we entered.

"This is your... your..." I stumbled a little, trying to think of what the word for the cot was.

"My bed?" She asked.

"Yes. Um, by the way," I tried to ask casually. "what's the name for this language we're, um, speaking in, again?"

"We're speaking Japanese," she said. "...Out of curiosity, how did you come to learn it?"

That was a very good question. I tried to think of where I had picked up Japanese from. Images and memories started to come to the surface, but they were too fuzzy to make any sense out of them.

I shrugged instead. "Have no idea."

There was a pause of silence, when I finally added, "Well, full day tomorrow." I smiled when I said the last part. "Sleep well."

She didn't respond for a moment, but then quickly returned the gesture. The smile she gave back lit up her face, and made me blush a little. Thank goodness it was dark. I hadn't quite realized how pretty she was until just then. With clear blue eyes, a petite frame, and long, wavy blonde hair, she was very pretty indeed.

"Good night," she called back softly, turning around to face her new living quarters.

With that, I turned around to go to sleep. As I crawled onto my cot, ready to be swept away by the darkness and my fatigue, her face was the last image I saw before hitting unconsciousness.

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><p>AN: Another update, the day right after actually uploading the story itself. I promise, it'll get better...  
>Okay, can't promise that, but I'll try my best!<br>This will probably be the last time I update so quickly. So I ,um, hope you enjoyed this chapter. Reviews are always appreciated!


	3. Chapter 3

Her name was SeeU. Well, not for real. Her name was something not pronouncable to neither me nor anyone else, so she became SeeU, in reference to the fact that, as the ringmaster so delicately put it, she was 'quite a sight to behold.' That wasn't the reason she was in the circus, though.

Like me, she was in the freak's section. Somewhere in all of that blonde hair were two black cat ears to go with her regular ones. Actual cat ears that twitched when she wanted them to, and pricked up when she heard something with the regular ones. Heaven knows how I managed to completely overlook that the night she first came. In the morning afterwards, they were pretty obvious. SeeU never told anyone how she ended up with cat ears, and nobody wanted to ask. It was pretty much an unspoken rule at the circus, "don't bring it up unless they talk about it." Bad things tended to happen to curious people with a need to badger others.

Over the span of 6 months, I had gotten to know her much better. She was seventeen, her birthday having been on the day she came to our circus company (Horrible timing fate has, I must say). Before, she had been in another company, a visiting one from Korea. They were actually more of a dancing troupe, with the cat ears as to push an exotic theme on the shows. When she had first told me this, she seemed to pause for a minute as though to give me more information, but seemed to hold back, and continued with the rest of the story. Though not the best dancer, she was one of the more attractive girls in the dance troupe, and a resulting standout. SeeU didn't know why they sold her to this company, she figured that maybe costs for keeping all of them grew to be too much. Reasoning told her that financial reasons must have been why she was sold, and it made her depressed to think of friends she left behind, so we didn't bring the subject up very often.

It must have been hard to get out of that depression, when what it was made out of was her entire past. Even her clothes, which consisted of an orange dress with a gray fringe at the bottom, was from her old company. Despite this, she managed to do well here and thrive as much as a person confined to a circus can thrive. She adapted well to living among the ugly parts of the circus, and seemed desensitized to the torture acts. Not interested really, but extremely nonchalant in an unsettling way.

With 6 months of practice, we could easily converse with each other. SeeU's Japanese was excellent, and with that, my Japanese started to improve as well. I still had no idea where I had learned it from.

Also, we had been put together sharing an act. We still had to attend the freak gallery, but on a night when SeeU had been teaching me a Japanese song she knew called Magnet, the ringmaster had been sneaking around the grounds. When he heard us singing, he decided to tell us that we were good by opening our tent door and yelling "AMAZING." like a crazy man in the middle of our song, which made her jump at the sudden outburst and me practically fall back and off the cot.

After allowing us to calm down, he told us that he wanted us to have an opportunity to sing the song. It was a romantic one, so we were to be portrayed as some sort of star-crossed pair who were wrong for each other in every way. The only part that was true for that entire plan was the 'completely wrong for each other' part. Out of all of them, the biggest difference was that she was four years my senior. Which was a lot. Also, I was pretty short for a thirteen-year old, so it made it pretty awkward to have to look up at her to make eye-contact. It really degraded what masculinity I managed to keep hold of. God knows how often I blushed while singing that song, with her trying not to burst into laughter at my embarrassment, before we could actually sing properly once-through. On the first night of our new performance, the song was a hit, apparently. Heaven knows what goes on in the minds of theses people when they seek entertainment. Keeping it to ourselves, SeeU and I thought it was a pretty stupid form of entertainment. Sure, we sounded okay, but it was so weird. Just... wrong, especially since we had to play the part. Even the song itself was almost too sincerely tender to be sung by us.

Then, one day, something changed. We had the day off. The company was touring at this point, and most of the day was going to be used to pack up everything and get ready to move up to the next city. The concession stands were still open, full of popcorn and candy apples that were going to go to waste because we were about to head onto the road. I had been sitting a little distance away from them with SeeU when I realized she had gone quiet. I looked up, and followed her eyes to find her staring at the candy apples.

"Oliver?" she asked after realizing I had caught her staring. "What does a candy apple taste like?"

"Hm.." I thought for a minute before giving an answer. "Ever had a regular apple?"

She nodded, still looking at the cart.

"It's like that, but sourer. They taste more preserved than a regular apple, and they're covered with caramel. It's rather sticky, but it makes the apple sweeter, like... Just, um..."

I couldn't really think of how else to describe it. I had never quite realized how difficult it was to describe something like a candy apple. How was one supposed to describe taste?

Despite my awkward silence, SeeU hadn't broken her eyes away from the cart, licking her lips a little. I had seen her look its way on our way to performances, but it hadn't been important because we had been on schedule, and there was no time to ask about apples.

After another considerable pause I looked toward the cart as well. How much did apples cost, anyway? I thought to myself. At the prompting of the question, a new idea had formed in my head. It was a lovely idea, one that made me smile a little on the inside.

There was always loose change hanging around after a performance. When one found a quarter, or a nickel, they picked it up. It was fair game, and most didn't bother to pick up the change anyway because it seemed useless to keep heavy coins around, especially when travelling. It also seemed too difficult to bother being robbed of the small amount of money in your bag after carrying it around for miles. Despite common sense arguing that there was no point in picking up the change during all of these years, some part of me had made me continue to pick up change when I saw it. Maybe I could actually put it to use, for once.

"Wait here," I told SeeU. She barely acknowledged this, nodding a little to indicate she had heard me.

With my hands in my pockets, I got up and walked along the rows of tents. I ducked into the tent and grabbed the small bag of change I kept under my bed.

Soon, I was walking back to SeeU, with the little bag of change in my pocket. I was really awful at math, but I had counted, and I thought there was enough change to buy two candy apples. Sure, it was gonna leave a dent in my already meager savings, but what was I going to do with it, anyway? Become rich off of pocket change?

I stood in front of the cart, waiting to get the vendor's attention. While he was unoccupied, I turned around to see her staring at me from where she was sitting, confused. I waved her over, and then turned around the face the vendor.

"Um, hello. Can I get you something?" he asked in a gruff voice. He must have been confused, which I didn't blame him for. I don't think that he, nor myself for that matter, had ever seen a circus performer buy something from the vendors.

"Yeah. I'd like two candy apples." I proceeded to take the knapsack, pull it upside-down, and empty its entire contents onto the counter.

The vendor seemed irritated, but didn't say anything, and began to count out the money for the apples. Uh-oh. Did I have enough to actually buy two apples? Even one apple? It would be the worst to bring up SeeU's hopes and come back empty-handed. I watched, a bit nervous, as he slowly counted out the change.

Thankfully, I received two apples and my leftover change, and I turned around again, now facing a wide-eyed SeeU, and handed her one of the apples.

"My treat," I smiled.

She looked at the apple, and then to me, and then back to the apple, and back to me. Moments later, she broke into a wide smile, as beautifully as she always did. Her smile, I had realized at this point, was kind of like sunshine. Always so bright and sincere. After thanking me quietly, she looked back to her apple again. Cautiously, she bit into it. The moment she could taste it, SeeU seemed to glow, and something in her eyes sparkled a little when she finished the first bite. Time seemed to slow for a moment there, wanting to capture this very moment. Though I didn't suspect it yet, it was the moment that everything changed.

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><p>AN: I truthfully have no idea where I'm going with this story. Expect some random stuff in the next few chapters, haha.  
>Reviews are appreciated.<p> 


	4. Chapter 4

I think that was what got me. That twinkle in her eye, that caused the change. That was what made me realize that I loved her.

To be honest, I don't understand why something like that would make me realize my feelings. It doesn't really make sense now when I look back to it. There was just something in her eyes that made me see the truth, that I loved SeeU. Maybe I had loved her the whole time. I don't know, and either way, it doesn't seem to matter. But what overcame the love was the feeling of dread, masking and distorting it. She couldn't possibly love me back. She would hate me if I ever admitted it. Yet, the feelings wouldn't go away. They felt too pure, and yet the feelings themselves felt wrong, somehow.

Believe me, I hate using that kind of contradiction, but it's the only way to describe it. She was so much older. Like an older sister, almost. She probably thought of me as a younger sibling. I couldn't think such things about her. But as we continued to seek company in each other, the small things she did, like her smiles, or grabbing my hand when leading us through a crowd, or hugging me when she thought I looked too despondent, they fought back the other feelings and planted a little thought in my mind that told me that this was just too right. I certainly had to hope that that one tiny voice in the back of my head was right, because there was no way to shake the feeling after the apples.

After that, it became obvious how this had affected me. I took the things she did more seriously, constantly monitoring her actions. Whenever we sang Magnet together after that, I meant it truly from the bottom of my heart. Sometimes, after we had settle down in our cots, I would peek over to her sleeping form. It was an obsessive thing. Maybe if I had stayed away from her, this wouldn't have happened. I could have recovered quietly for a while, and then perhaps returned when I had gotten over this phase. But really, how could I? I was the only one she could communicate with, and we were an ideal match as we got along very well. We even slept in the same room. There was really no way to get around it at that point, and being around her only made it worse.

As I admired her secretly, there was always a conflicting rise of emotions that entered my mind. The most obvious one was the disgust. We really did have a close friendship, and almost treated each other like how siblings would. Would I really think such immoral thoughts towards my older sister? This part of my mind was always full of self-hatred. It scolded me about how selfish I must be to put my wants before hers, to ruin her new start here. What could she do if she rejected you?, they said. She'd be helpless, without assistance, and it would be your fault.

There was another side of emotions as well, emotions that were the polar opposite of the other ones. My affection for her always clashed with the other thoughts, and managed to keep up a good fight with the negative thoughts despite being much frailer, which kept up my hope that maybe, she might like me back. We were ordered to sing a love song together! If it were real love, it would be okay to everyone too, right? Maybe she liked me, too. Maybe she felt like how I did... It was a thin sliver of a hope, but one that seemed to never quite fade.

The last side was confusion. I had never really felt something like this before. Before SeeU, I had never really had any close relationship with a girl before. Maybe I didn't know what love was, and this was a phase from being around the opposite gender. These emotions were really just a jumble of thoughts that I couldn't put together, ones that I couldn't organize.

Sometimes, all of them drove me near a breaking point. And when that started to happen, SeeU was always there. She had my back, and it reinforced the emotions of affection for her. It was a vicious cycle that only got worse as it progressed.

Meanwhile, she continued to smile and laugh with me. Despite being my weakness, she also brought me strength. Maybe, I thought, I'm going crazy. I needed time to think. Time to think alone, preferably. But not so for Robot-Eye, and his cat-girl partner. Being performance partners meant sticking together for everything. And besides, could I really stand to be away from her for a long period of time? While I was painfully aware of what consequences being in her presence might have, I also knew I would't be able to resist her. This situation was so much worse than I thought.

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><p>AN: Sorry for not updating for so long! I had a bit of writer's block, and I've been busy with school...  
>But here's the latest chapter! I'm kind of not sure where I want to go with this, so if you have any suggestions, feel free to tell me.<br>Also, please review! I really love it when I get a new review~


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